Today, we’ve been out to the #HambacherForst – one of Europe’s oldest still existing mixed forests. Over the last decades, it has been cut down almost entirely in order to make place for dirty coal mining. If anyone ever asked what that big brown hole near Cologne on Google Maps is – well, here you are.
Since a few years, activists have been occupying the forest using tree houses and creative forms of protest against the company which owns the coal mine, power plants, and the forest – RWE. This week, the local government of North-Rhine Westphalia in a shady manner ordered > 3.500 police forces to evict the forest for reasons of “fire risk”; notably right after they took fire extuingishers away from the activists because they might be used as weapons against police forces.
There’s just so many wrong things about this, it’s unbelievable. Even representatives of the police told that they consider their mission as unnecessary – but the government apparently thinks preventing people from being in a forest is the most important thing for the safety of North-Rhine-Westphalia right now. In the meantime on the federal level the government, parliament and representatives of environmental associations and of the industrial branches are currently negotiating the end of coal mining in Germany. Instead of waiting for the results of these negotiations, RWE, its respective lobbyists, (&) the government of CDU & FDP try to demonstrate their power and their ignorance towards the future of this planet, towards reaching the Paris Agreement, and concerning any dimensions of sustainability.
Now, over the last couple of days hundreds of us of all parts of society are gathering and peacefully protesting the eviction of the activists; breaking through into the forest and showing that we want a world in which we and our children are actually able to somehow live a healthy life. We’ve been there today, because going to the streets is more important than sharing social media pics alone, and we won’t stop committing to climate justice, our nature, and our world. #HambiBleibt!
More information: https://hambachforest.org / https://aktion-unterholz.org / on basically pretty much every German news outlet these days.
Next possibility to join in? Tomorrow at the Waldspaziergang-Spezial – Hambacher Wald und Klima retten 3.0!